AMD Radeon HD 3830 to compete with NVIDIA 8600GTS in price and performance

There's been a great deal of news regarding AMD's HD 3800 series of high-end desktop video cards including predictions of upcoming price cuts to compete with NVIDIA's 9600 GT mid-range product. The two models AMD currently offers in this high-end Radeon line of graphics cards are the HD 3850 and HD 3870.

AMD's Radeon HD 3830 will be based on the RV670 core and will feature a 128-bit memory bus, potentially providing roughly half the memory bandwidth of the HD 3850 and 3870 depending on the type and speed of memory used.

All other features of the 55nm RV670 core are still included: DirectX 10.1, PCIe 2.0 and UVD. The GPU still features 320 stream processors like the HD 3850 and HD 3870 revisions.

According to recent reports, the HD 3830 will feature up to 256 MB of memory and come with 320 stream processors as well as 16 texture filtering units and 16 raster operators to match the HD 3850/3870 models. This is compared to the 32 stream processors, 16 texture filtering units and 8 raster operators of the 8600GTS's G84 core.

Can any one confirm this, I know that the IGP can crossfire with other videocards that differ in design. But I am unaware of a 3850's ability to crossfire with the 3870 AND i know for a fact if you try to use a IGP with the 3850 the IGP will dissable its self.

Hmm, So I guess there's a point at which the 3870X2 > "3850X3". I still respect the compatibility effort.

I would've liked AMD to say to people "hey, we're gonna have a 3870X2 and this crazy crossfire thing in like 6 months so if you get a single 3870 for now, you can get a 3870X2 later and turn your system into a high end system without wasting a videocard.